Fathers & Sons

I’ve been thinking about fathers lately. To be more specific, I’ve been thinking about fathers and children and their relationships - especially sons. Take any family and go back a few generations working forward and you will probably find that fathers in particular hold a lion share in the way their children turn out. It struck me that one father in a long line of fathers can really cock things up or alternatively right many wrongs and break the chain of bad fatherhood. In the father – child relationship the father is the more important one. Not more important in terms of hierarchy but more important looking at the outcome of this relationship and what happens afterwards. A father does not need his children as role models nor does he necessarily change the way he is depending on what his children are like. The father can have more than one child and can have more children without ever looking after them if he so chooses. The child however has always only one father – for life – period! Children who have not been acknowledged by their father during childhood as loveable, acceptable, forgivable and important human beings will very often turn out to have low self esteem, carry guilt and swing to either end of the scale of being very introvert or aggressively, moodily extrovert. This in turn often leads to them treating their children just like they were treated without ever meaning to do so.

A healthy relationship from father to child is not easily achieved since nobody ever tells you how to be a good father. I guess it takes time and effort as well as the realisation that as fathers we also are just men with many mistakes and hang-ups and by no means infallible. Speaking on a personal note I believe I could have been a much better father, in spite of always wanting the best for my children. So what kept me from being this better father?? A lot of it I guess might have been my relationship with my father. There was for example the often unnecessary need to enforce or correct little, unimportant things. Who, for example, really cares if a door has been left ajar or if the knives and forks are the wrong way round? Does it matter if we arrive 10 minutes late for a get-together or that the music is being played a tad too loud? Being busy to bring up the children with my own (my father’s) standards I did not realise how small-minded and stifling this approach often was. The other trait I have definitely inherited from my father is the short attention span I have when talking to them. Like my father I am always very happy when they arrive at the door step and we have a meal together but nearly always it is me who leaves the table first, missing out on any family conversation which might follow.

Like me with my father so I wonder if my kids also find it difficult to just come and talk to me. I guess they must do. In all my upbringing (and it was a good upbringing) I never had the feeling that I was accepted as an equal in this father-child relationship and maybe this is something which cannot be achieved but it left me with a lot of insecurities, feelings of unworthiness and hidden angers which, during the upbringing of my children manifested themselves in the enemy of all relationships: INCONSISTANCY!!
Often I saw my children trying to test the water to see what mood I was in since the answer to a simple question could have several very opposing outcomes depending on the state of my present mood. This should not happen and yet I am plagued with it to this very day. I look at my children and I am amazed how they have turned out in spite of all of this and I am extremely proud of how lovely and thoughtful they are. I do see them as adults in their own right and not just as ‘offspring’ and they deserve credit for beating the odds of becoming clones.
Was my father a bad father – far from it! He loved us and looked after us, he kept us safe and tried to teach us respect. He just did it in the only way he knew how to – in a mixture of how he himself had been brought up and personal judgement. I guess that is all one can ever do. My heart however goes out to those children who through no fault of their own do not have a father. Their challenge to bring up their children is a great one indeed.

As for me . . . I am both – a father and a son and mighty blessed to be in that situation.